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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Auster, Get a Grip!

And the anti-American right, or at least Patrick Buchanan, has perfectly revealed himself; he doesn’t believe in defending America and the West, he believes in surrendering to and appeasing Muslims at all costs. ~Lawrence Auster Auster often makes basically good observations that he then manages to ruin through either his monomania about Islam or his […]

And the anti-American right, or at least Patrick Buchanan, has perfectly revealed himself; he doesn’t believe in defending America and the West, he believes in surrendering to and appeasing Muslims at all costs. ~Lawrence Auster

Auster often makes basically good observations that he then manages to ruin through either his monomania about Islam or his gift for hyperbole (coming from me, that is really saying something). As I have written a couple times, Mr. Buchanan’s reaction to the cartoon controversy has been puzzling and, frankly, disappointing, but I am not so daft as to forget the decades of yeoman-like work Mr. Buchanan has put in on behalf of the defense of the West and Christian conservatives in this country. Indeed, one would have to be tremendously ungrateful and obnoxious to disregard an entire life’s work to this effect because of two columns that have gone awry.

It is one thing to say that Mr. Buchanan has missed something crucial in the cartoon debate, and that his reaction seems to contradict some other central ideas in his conservatism, and quite another to accuse him in ludicrously Frum-like fashion of being anti-American and an “appeaser” of Islam. This is simply insulting and clownish. No sensible person could accuse Mr. Buchanan of appeasing Islam, when his magazine’s forthcoming cover suggests that, as far as the American interest is concerned, Muslims in the Near East and elsewhere should probably not be allowed or encouraged to vote. TAC does not generally trot out the shopworn rhetoric that only “extremist” Muslims are the problem with the Islamic world, nor does it entertain notions that we have any common ground with Islamists. If you want “appeasers,” if you really want to drag out that tired, worthless and now largely meaningless holdover from the 1930s into this debate, I believe Rich “Give Sistani a Nobel Prize” Lowry has a better shot at it than Mr. Buchanan ever would.

Posing serious objections to what we regard as mistakes is what intelligent political writers and critics do. Throwing around labels of “anti-American” and “appeaser” is the practise of hacks and goon squads. Now we know, if we didn’t already, which one Auster is.

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